Wood

Third party iPhone accessory makers have taken the next step in iPhone personalization with solid wood back panels - not a case, not a skin, but an actual real replacement for the glass back you've grown tired of. There are two different groups I'd like to share with you here, one of them a bit more expensive with a wider range of options, the other more affordable and keeping with the simplicity. Both of these groups offer backs for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S.

Like the passing of a very, very old uncle after he'd been telling you he didn't have one whole heck of a lot of time left on this earth for so very, very long, the fifth oldest tree on the planet burned from the inside this week, falling not to any sort of arson on the part of a human body, but mother nature herself, deciding it was just time for The Senator to go. This titanically gigantic piece of forest was known as "The Big Tree" or, again, The Senator, and is survived by his wife, "Lady Liberty," a 2,000-year old tree in the same Longwood, Florida park. Though we rarely report on non-gadget news here at SlashGear, there comes a time when we must appreciate how the whole world can connect and respect one of the world's oldest natural living things, all together because of the web we've created. What a lovely thing.

Now that the holiday season is approaching much faster than I'm sure anyone in a position to have to drop their hard-earned bills would want it to, one must wonder what a tech-minded person might want, especially one who has everything, especially one who also has a kid: how about some wood? As it's been made clear here on SlashGear, many of us have kids of our own, and though we might want to keep them as far from the gadgets we've got engulfing our everyday lives as we can, they've inevitably got them in their mouths on the daily. That's why an engraving group by the fancy name of "3Princesses" has decided to make a line of wooden baby toys to nip the drool problem in the bud.

A designer by the name of Matthias Wandel had an idea. Not that he was the first person to think of this idea, but he's certainly the first one to execute it in a way that found our eyeballs. More than likely if he aims it right, it'll be blasting out eyeballs in a very real way, too. This is the Jenga Pistol. Using simple mechanics, wood, a bit of metal, and a rubber band, this Wandel has created a completely awesome cheat tool, a real world hack, for the block toppling game Jenga.

It may look like an Apple MacBook - albeit one pretty thoroughly bleached - but this is actually a school project. Kyle Buckner crafted this 3/4-scale MacBook model out of wood, with a hand-cut working hinge, and then filled in the details with a pencil.

Wood seems to be growing in popularity as a PC case mod material, and it's certainly shown off to its best advantage in the shape of Nick Falzone's Chiaroscuro. Made from ebony and maple, this is less of a case mod and more of a ground-up new build; inspired by the renderings of the Beijing Digital building, it's a beautiful sandwich of wood, black brushed aluminum and UV acrylic.

At first glance this looks like a Gameboy Micro clad in wood, but actually the scale is rather different. The handiwork of The Longhorn Engineer, it's in fact a modified Nintendo-on-a-chip (NOAC) retro NES gaming console packed into a custom wooden case and given a 3.5-inch display and Li-ion batteries for some portable classic play.

ViewSonic has long been one of the best LCD manufacturers on the market, so it’s not surprise that they eventually decided to give the whole digital picture frame thing a go, and now they have. They have new 7, 8, and 10 inch models that are available just in time for Mother’s Day.

They went to a whole new level of detail with this wooden radio. The end of the telescopic antenna is wooden, the knobs are wooden, the speaker grill is wooden, the external antenna has both a wooden connector and a wooden circle at the other end and the auxiliary input cable has wooden jacks on both ends.